On a very, very personal note, last Friday's attack at the University of Alabama-Huntsville impacted me, as I can see it has impacted others in our class. It was very strange - I was sitting at work and suddenly my phone went off, telling me I had a voicemail, but there was no missed call. The voicemail was from one of my girlfriends from Kansas. She sounded very concerned and asked me if I was okay - she had thought I was going to be in Tuscaloosa this weekend and she had heard there had been a shooting at the University of Alabama (she didn't hear, apparently, that the shooting was not at Bama's main campus in Tuscaloosa but at its satellite campus in Huntsville), and she was worried about me. This voicemail was the first I had heard of any shooting in Alabama, and my heart dropped to the floor. My mind automatically went to someone very, very close to me who is a student at Alabama. I immediately called him and he was, of course, fine - only later did I learn that the shooting was not in Tuscaloosa but at the Huntsville campus. I was shaken up for the rest of the day and all through the night. These feelings came even after I heard that not only was Andrew okay, but the shooting happened three hours from the campus he is on.
I guess the question I will pose in this blog is this - if I felt so shaken up and spit out after absolutely nothing happened to the person I care most about in this world, how would I feel if he had been injured? If he had been severely hurt? Or God forbid, if he had died? How can and how do universities properly handle these types of situations? How do counseling centers handle the aftermath of a tragedy like this - helping to heal those who survived the tragedy, but potentially have a lifetime of healing to repair the wounds inflicted not necessarily by gunshots but by broken hearts?
An excellent resource I found on the topic was offered up by the American School Counselor Association and can be found here: http://www.schoolcounselor.org/content.asp?contentid=524
However, based off of what I read on the website, I started thinking about how I would want to be treated if, God forbid, a tragedy like this were to happen on my campus and I survived.
I would first have to know that the counseling center was available and ready to help me if I should ever need it. The counseling center could benefit from offering group therapy workshops so that a student could attend with a friend if they were uncomfortable seeing a counselor by themselves, or if they were afraid of the stigma seeing a counselor carries (my mom is a therapist by trade, so I know all about that). The counseling center would need to be staffed nearly 24/7 to accomodate all of the students needing assistance. Pamphlets, brochures, and E-mails would need to circulate with helpful tips on how to slowly but surely reel in from a tragedy of this magnitude. Above all else, a counseling center would need to show that they care, that they are there for students, and that they too are reeling from the tragedy - that members of the counseling staff and the students can work through their pain together.
When a shooter commits acts of violence on a college campus - or anywhere - I wonder if they realize how many people they affect. The victims in a school shooting are not able to just be counted by the number of dead bodies left behind. Greer, myself, and anyone who felt any amount of pain or anguish over last Friday's killings are victims of Amy Bishop's rage. In this case, three may be dead, but hundreds of thousands of others are emotionally wounded by her actions. While I'm sure many of my classmates chose to write about what we as college administrators can do to prevent the shooting from happening, I wanted to take a different angle and focus on what we can do after - God forbid - something like this happens. Eventually, with time, a college campus will heal. I believe time heals all wounds. But effective practices by a university's counseling center can only help ease the pain felt by all who were touched, in even the slightest way, by such an unspeakable act of violence.
My thoughts are with UAH in this difficult time.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Free Speech on College Campuses
This week's blog topic was one that really interested me personally - the topic of free speech on a college campus. In my undergraduate years, I took a class called First Amendment and Society to fulfill requirements for my journalism degree, and we spoke about free speech at length. As someone who is extremely interested in the law and is even considering possibly enrolling in law school one day, anything dealing with the Constitution is interesting to me, especially if we are looking at it through the lens of a college campus.
I found the FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) website to be extremely helpful in providing a framework for the discussion of free speech. As our assignment was to find the most recent free speech case on a college campus and comment on it, I will be writing about a case at San Jose State University. You can find the full text of the article here on FIRE's website: http://www.thefire.org/article/11548.html
In summary, the housing department at SJSU revised several restrictive policies that basically prohibited free speech on campus. Let's compare the old policy to the new...
The Old: Any form of activity, whether covert or overt, that creates a significantly uncomfortable, threatening, or harassing environment for any UHS resident or guest will be handled judicially and may be grounds for immediate disciplinary action, revocation of the Housing License Agreement, and criminal prosecution. The conduct does not have to be intended to harass. The conduct is evaluated from the complainant's perspective.
The New: Any form of activity, whether covert or overt, that creates a threatening or harassing environment for any UHS resident, guest, or staff member will be handled judicially and may be grounds for immediate disciplinary action, revocation of the Housing License Agreement, and criminal prosecution.
Rather than there being plenty of new key words in the new policy, it is important to note instead the words that have been removed - the word "uncomfortable" and the entire last sentence of the old policy, which stated "the conduct does not have to be intended to harass. The conduct is evaluated from the complainant's perspective." By removing that last sentence, SJSU is complying much more with grounds of free speech. By saying that "the conduct does not have to be intended to harass," that is basically implying that I could get kicked out of my residence hall if anything I said to anyone was taken the wrong way. If I said "the sky is blue" and someone got offended slightly by it, I could be removed from my residence hall and rendered homeless, which doesn't seem to be the least bit rational. Also, by evaluating the situation from "the complainant's perspective," it takes away the judiciality of the case and puts it into the hands of an emotional, offended, college-aged student who basically wields the power to kick a student out of the residence hall. It seems a bit overdone and not nearly fair enough.
Free speech is such an important right that we as American citizens all have. I am happy to see that organizations such as FIRE even exist to make sure that we retain that right to free speech, especially on a college campus. SJSU's example is one step in the right direction for higher education to continually move in the direction of free speech for all - and, because they are setting the precedent, we will hopefully see advances in the movement for years to come.
I found the FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) website to be extremely helpful in providing a framework for the discussion of free speech. As our assignment was to find the most recent free speech case on a college campus and comment on it, I will be writing about a case at San Jose State University. You can find the full text of the article here on FIRE's website: http://www.thefire.org/article/11548.html
In summary, the housing department at SJSU revised several restrictive policies that basically prohibited free speech on campus. Let's compare the old policy to the new...
The Old: Any form of activity, whether covert or overt, that creates a significantly uncomfortable, threatening, or harassing environment for any UHS resident or guest will be handled judicially and may be grounds for immediate disciplinary action, revocation of the Housing License Agreement, and criminal prosecution. The conduct does not have to be intended to harass. The conduct is evaluated from the complainant's perspective.
The New: Any form of activity, whether covert or overt, that creates a threatening or harassing environment for any UHS resident, guest, or staff member will be handled judicially and may be grounds for immediate disciplinary action, revocation of the Housing License Agreement, and criminal prosecution.
Rather than there being plenty of new key words in the new policy, it is important to note instead the words that have been removed - the word "uncomfortable" and the entire last sentence of the old policy, which stated "the conduct does not have to be intended to harass. The conduct is evaluated from the complainant's perspective." By removing that last sentence, SJSU is complying much more with grounds of free speech. By saying that "the conduct does not have to be intended to harass," that is basically implying that I could get kicked out of my residence hall if anything I said to anyone was taken the wrong way. If I said "the sky is blue" and someone got offended slightly by it, I could be removed from my residence hall and rendered homeless, which doesn't seem to be the least bit rational. Also, by evaluating the situation from "the complainant's perspective," it takes away the judiciality of the case and puts it into the hands of an emotional, offended, college-aged student who basically wields the power to kick a student out of the residence hall. It seems a bit overdone and not nearly fair enough.
Free speech is such an important right that we as American citizens all have. I am happy to see that organizations such as FIRE even exist to make sure that we retain that right to free speech, especially on a college campus. SJSU's example is one step in the right direction for higher education to continually move in the direction of free speech for all - and, because they are setting the precedent, we will hopefully see advances in the movement for years to come.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Students and Their Community
From what I gather from Sparky's instructions about this week's blog, we are to write about students and the university community that they are a part of. Let me tell you something I have found to be unabashedly true - there is no place on this earth like a college campus. The excitement of youth mixed with the joy of learning combined with hope for the future makes the college campus a dynamic place to be. There are truly very few places like the campus of an institution of higher learning. That's why folks like me and many of the other students in the higher education administration master's program just can't seem to leave. The aura of a college campus, the sheer ability to be on a college campus - well, it's pretty amazing.
But our college campus community is changing - and, in many ways, already has changed - from the college campus community of our parents' generation, and especially from the college campus community of our grandparents.
Let me explain.
My mom loves to talk about her college days. She went to school at KU (the University of Kansas, the same school I went to for undergrad) and she was there in the middle of the 1970s - a time very ripe with student demonstrations, protests, and activism. Lawrence, Kansas - where KU is located - is the liberal oasis in the conservative state of Kansas (which sometimes drove me crazy, but that is another blog topic for another day) and even today is a hub for the type of student activism that was at its height in my mom's college days. She talks frequently about she and her friends gathering at the Union, pulling up to a table, and sitting there for hours upon hours talking about the latest work they had read in English, or about what the president was doing. A common theme that is constantly repeated as my mom discusses her college days was that there was just so much conversation. So much communication. There were informal debates on the lawns outside of Fraser Hall. Groups of students would congregate on Wescoe Beach (which is not actually a beach, just in case you don't know anything about Kansas geography) and discuss Congress, or popular music, or current events, or the weather for pete's sake. Her college experience of the 1970s was definable by the spoken word. She learned just as much outside the classroom through these conversations, she said, than she did inside the classroom. And often, she points out, the conversations from inside the classroom would trickle out to outside the classroom because students were so engrossed in what they were learning that they could just not stop talking about it.
Psh.
Not exactly my college experience.
It is a new day and age, that's for sure. My college experience was pretty well summed up by a meeting I attended tonight, actually. I walked into the meeting a few minutes early, parked myself in my seat, looked up and saw every student in the room literally attached to their cell phones. Texting, playing games, surfing the Internet - I don't know what they were doing, but they were click-click-clicking away. The room full of students was absolutely silent. Some students had their iPod ear buds tucked in their ears. One was fiddling around on his laptop on Facebook - where students now discuss topics not face-to-face, but through wall posts and group discussion boards. Whereas mom's generation were talkers, we are a dead silent generation.
All of the technology that has infiltrated our society has made us shut our mouths. The atmosphere in the room tonight at my meeting pretty well summed up my four years in college. Walking down campus, I cannot count how many times I was mortified trying to get the attention of one of my friends by yelling their name over and over again, only to be rebuffed and ignored, or so I thought - turns out they just had those stupid iPod ear buds in and couldn't hear me. Wescoe Beach - the center of so much rampant communication when my mom was an undergrad - is silent most of the time. Shoot, why would you want to have a face-to-face conversation if you can just IM someone, or (even worse) poke them on Facebook? Why verbalize feelings when you can let it all out in an E-mail, or why meet up with someone for lunch when you can eat by yourself and text three, four, five of your friends while you do it?
I mentioned earlier that the college campus is a place unlike any other in this world. I still feel that way, I really do, but technology is taking some of the sparkle and the magic out of a college campus. Nowadays (I sound so old...I'm really not intending to, I'm only 23!) students are in a rush to leave the classroom and would be damned to talk about the lecture outside of class. Doesn't that make you a - gasp - geek? And no one wants that. It seems as though we are losing a sense of community on college campuses because life is just so individualized now. Technology is working to make our lives pretty solitary. Maybe not on the surface - I guess you're still communicating, albeit backwards, even if you're texting or Facebooking - but we as a generation are beginning to forget how to socially interact. This is devaluing our sense of community and rusting over the luster and shine of college campuses.
I will step off my soapbox now. But I will leave you with a closing thought. What if we all put down our iPods and iPads or whatever they call it all now and just talked to each other? I bet our sense of community would skyrocket. Now that is an experiment I am willing to try.
But our college campus community is changing - and, in many ways, already has changed - from the college campus community of our parents' generation, and especially from the college campus community of our grandparents.
Let me explain.
My mom loves to talk about her college days. She went to school at KU (the University of Kansas, the same school I went to for undergrad) and she was there in the middle of the 1970s - a time very ripe with student demonstrations, protests, and activism. Lawrence, Kansas - where KU is located - is the liberal oasis in the conservative state of Kansas (which sometimes drove me crazy, but that is another blog topic for another day) and even today is a hub for the type of student activism that was at its height in my mom's college days. She talks frequently about she and her friends gathering at the Union, pulling up to a table, and sitting there for hours upon hours talking about the latest work they had read in English, or about what the president was doing. A common theme that is constantly repeated as my mom discusses her college days was that there was just so much conversation. So much communication. There were informal debates on the lawns outside of Fraser Hall. Groups of students would congregate on Wescoe Beach (which is not actually a beach, just in case you don't know anything about Kansas geography) and discuss Congress, or popular music, or current events, or the weather for pete's sake. Her college experience of the 1970s was definable by the spoken word. She learned just as much outside the classroom through these conversations, she said, than she did inside the classroom. And often, she points out, the conversations from inside the classroom would trickle out to outside the classroom because students were so engrossed in what they were learning that they could just not stop talking about it.
Psh.
Not exactly my college experience.
It is a new day and age, that's for sure. My college experience was pretty well summed up by a meeting I attended tonight, actually. I walked into the meeting a few minutes early, parked myself in my seat, looked up and saw every student in the room literally attached to their cell phones. Texting, playing games, surfing the Internet - I don't know what they were doing, but they were click-click-clicking away. The room full of students was absolutely silent. Some students had their iPod ear buds tucked in their ears. One was fiddling around on his laptop on Facebook - where students now discuss topics not face-to-face, but through wall posts and group discussion boards. Whereas mom's generation were talkers, we are a dead silent generation.
All of the technology that has infiltrated our society has made us shut our mouths. The atmosphere in the room tonight at my meeting pretty well summed up my four years in college. Walking down campus, I cannot count how many times I was mortified trying to get the attention of one of my friends by yelling their name over and over again, only to be rebuffed and ignored, or so I thought - turns out they just had those stupid iPod ear buds in and couldn't hear me. Wescoe Beach - the center of so much rampant communication when my mom was an undergrad - is silent most of the time. Shoot, why would you want to have a face-to-face conversation if you can just IM someone, or (even worse) poke them on Facebook? Why verbalize feelings when you can let it all out in an E-mail, or why meet up with someone for lunch when you can eat by yourself and text three, four, five of your friends while you do it?
I mentioned earlier that the college campus is a place unlike any other in this world. I still feel that way, I really do, but technology is taking some of the sparkle and the magic out of a college campus. Nowadays (I sound so old...I'm really not intending to, I'm only 23!) students are in a rush to leave the classroom and would be damned to talk about the lecture outside of class. Doesn't that make you a - gasp - geek? And no one wants that. It seems as though we are losing a sense of community on college campuses because life is just so individualized now. Technology is working to make our lives pretty solitary. Maybe not on the surface - I guess you're still communicating, albeit backwards, even if you're texting or Facebooking - but we as a generation are beginning to forget how to socially interact. This is devaluing our sense of community and rusting over the luster and shine of college campuses.
I will step off my soapbox now. But I will leave you with a closing thought. What if we all put down our iPods and iPads or whatever they call it all now and just talked to each other? I bet our sense of community would skyrocket. Now that is an experiment I am willing to try.
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